Not able to get Windows 7 in bootable partition

Using the system below, I've tried to install my retail licensed copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit in a partition I created. This is a new system under extended warranty so OVERWRITING or REPLACING the OEM OS is not desirable. The installation went all the way to the end and gave me an error message hardware not compatible with the OS being installed. I pretty much followed this tutorial:


How to Dual Boot Pre installed Windows 8 with Windows 7


I have a legacy Microsoft Train Simulator which I need to have run for the purpose of creating content. It worked fine with Windows 7. 10 collective years of those working with this program have pretty much concluded it won't run with Windows 8.x. When I first received this system, with the help of Dell technical support, we overwrote the factory installation with Windows 7 and it worked flawlessly, including the simulator. Changes were made in the F2 setup utility. Shortly after that I made the decision, perhaps stupidly, to return the system to it's factory configuration since that's what I paid for.


Any additional help would be appreciated.


Hank Sundermeyer
Newark, DE

DELL XPS 9530 Laptop
Windows 8.1 64bit
4th Gen Intel Quad Core i7-4712HQ CPU 3.3 GHz
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (8GBx2)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB GDDR5

Since you have a quad core it may be fast enough to load Windows 7 as a guest OS using the free VMWare Player. The player is very easy to set up. Once W7 is installed opt to install VMWare Tools when prompted. It will let you drag and drop files from W8 to W7 and vice versa.

I have tried getting W7 x64 to boot as a VHD several times with no luck. But it works fine, if a bit slower, in VMWare Player.